Metadata from <front> to </back>: Publishing Metadata with UTP Journals

This entry was posted on November 19, 2018 by Amber Dilabbio.

Last week, we attended Crossref LIVE18 with this year's theme being How good is your metadata? In preparation for the conference, we put together a poster outlining our metadata workflow and how we plan to continually adapt in the ever-changing world of scholarly metadata. Download the poster here (PDF) or continue reading to learn more about how we work with metadata.

UTP Journals Metadata Workflow

At UTP Journals, our mission is to publish exemplary works of scholarship and to disseminate knowledge widely for the benefit of society. Metadata is the key to this mission in a digital world. Our metadata workflow starts from manuscript submission and flows through the editorial and production process, building and improving until publication and beyond.

1. Manuscript Submission

Authors create their own article metadata in an individual journal’s submission system by completing form fields as part of the submission process. With the power of Clarivate’s ScholarOne Manuscripts™ and a robust XML export process, this metadata is retained throughout editing and production processes.

Submission metadata includes:

Article Title

Abstract(s)—some journals publish English and/or French abstracts, as well as lay summaries

2. Editorial Process

Editors also contribute article metadata at various stages between manuscript submission and production.

As part of ScholarOne’s editorial and peer review workflow, editors can accept articles and assign them to specific volumes and issues for a journal, as well as assign or automatically generate a DOI before the article even reaches production.

Metadata added at this stage includes:

Date accepted

Volume and issue assignment

Issue title

TOC subject title

DOI

3. Typesetting and File Prep

Files are prepped, processed, and tagged before and after copy editing to ensure the manuscript, and particularly the references, are tagged meaningfully prior to publication. We use JATS XML to store journal metadata alongside manuscripts.

Early in production, individual articles may be published as Advance Online (AO) articles and receive a “preprint” date in the XML. AO DOIs are registered and retained in final publication when they’re updated with the full set of metadata.

DOIs are automatically added to references when reference data matches Crossref records, so authors don’t necessarily need to hunt down article DOIs in order to improve reference linking.

Metadata is completed prior to publication, including:

Advance Online date

EPUB date

PPUB date

License data including license type and copyright URL

References

Full-text URL

4. Publication and Indexing

Advance Online articles and version of record articles share one DOI and one URL. Our platform also allows us to enable multiple resolution URLs for journals simultaneously hosted by our partners, including Project MUSE, EBSCO, and JSTOR. This ensures that users have additional possible avenues of access.

We have dedicated team members monitoring DOIs for errors and conflicts to ensure the metadata we deposit is high quality and accessible, as well as to make improvements to our metadata deposits as they become available..

With over 20 complete online archives, all digitized content has been registered with Crossref with unique DOIs and metadata.

All of UTP’s content is registered with our 10.3138 DOI prefix, and each article begins with a 3-to-8-letter code (usually an acronym) matching the DOI of the journal it’s been published in.

The Future of UTP Metadata

How good is our metadata? Only as good as we continuously strive to make it.

Participation Reports: At UTP, we are now exploring Crossref’s beta Participation Reports tool to see where we can improve our metadata in the future. It all ties into the interest we have in what metadata matters when it comes to UTP’s particular journal content.

Upcoming Automatic Deposit Support: UTP Journals Online, powered by Atypon® Literatum, is actively improving in its index depositing capabilities to ensure the metadata we retain is deposited wherever possible. One of the features we anticipate is automatic authentication for the ORCIDs that authors provide. Support for abstract deposits are expected in an upcoming release, and we eagerly anticipate future upgrades.

Investing in Metadata: We have exciting plans to improve our metadata workflow, further enrich the metadata we publish, and invest the necessary time and resources to accomplish our goal of publishing quality metadata across all journals.

Author Resources

We want authors to understand the importance of the metadata they provide, as well as how it is used. Our online and print author resources explain:

Why is it important to write a meaningful title, abstract, and keywords?

Why link to the version of record?

What is a digital object identifier (DOI)?

How do ORCIDs improve article metadata and discoverability?

Learn More

Keep checking Crossref LIVE18 for recorded sessions of this year's conference and see our author resources if you'd like to learn more about publishing with UTP Journals.

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